Dead Men's s Boots

You might just as well steal a pillow off the bed or a towel out of the bathroom. Unless-

‘I think we need to know more,’ Juliet said bluntly, sending the fugitive thought skittering.

‘About Hunter?’ I demanded. ‘Or about Kale?’

‘About both, probably. Coldwood hired me to tell him what happened in room seventeen of the Paragon. I thought I’d done that, but now I’ll have to go back and tell him that I was wrong. That he’s brought in a dead murderer as well as a living one. When I do that, I want to be able to answer any questions that he might have.

’

‘And is that all?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, it isn’t. You don’t catch ghosts like you catch a cold, Castor. If Kale is insid s Ka hee Hunter, there’s an explanation for how she got there, and we ought to know what that is. We need to know. Because it changes the nature of the game, for all of us. All the ghostbreakers. Everyone who binds the dead and the undead for a living.’

I was relieved that Juliet was still along for the ride, because giving up wasn’t an option I had right now.

Apart from anything else, it meant I’d have to look over my shoulder every time I got into a goddamn lift. And Hunter – or the thing speaking through Hunter’s mouth – had used that word. Inscription. The same word that had cropped up in the fragment of notepaper inside John Gittings’s pocket watch: and, probably less significantly, in my dream.

‘We can backtrack Hunter’s movements,’ I suggested. ‘See if we can figure out where and when he picked up his passenger.

’

‘By talking to his wife?’

‘To start with, yeah. And there’s something else we can do. Something a little bit more radical – but it’ll take some time to set up.’

‘Go on.’

‘We can raise the ghost of Myriam Kale.’

Juliet looked at me and laughed – a liquid, musical sound. ‘Raise? You don’t think she might already have ideas above her station?’

‘I mean pull as opposed to push,’ I snapped, her cold amusement stinging me probably more than it was meant to. ‘It’s another way of getting to the same place.

If we can find something that belonged to her when she was alive – something she’s got a strong enough link to – then we don’t need to get close to Hunter. We can call her from a distance. Bring her out from inside him and make her come and talk to us. Two birds with one stone: we set Hunter free and we get a chance to get the story out of Kale’s own mouth.’

‘Well, that’s going to the source,’ Juliet observed dryly. ‘I like it.